Téa Obreht

Biography

Téa Obreht was born as Tea Bajraktarević in the autumn of 1985, in Belgrade, SR Serbia, SFR Yugoslavia as the only child of a single mother, Maja, while her father, a Bosniak, was "never part of the picture."

Because of her lack of a father figure, she was close to her maternal grandparents, especially to her grandfather Štefan, a Slovene of German origin, and to her grandmother, Zahida, a Bosniak. When the Yugoslav Wars started in the early 1990s, there was no fighting in her home town of Belgrade or in Serbia, but there was concern due to her grandparents' religions, as Roman Catholicism and Islam are closely associated with Croatia and Bosnia, respectively, which was a serious distinction at the time of the war. They didn't flee immediately, but decided to move to Cyprus for precautionary reasons when her mother found a job there. Eighteen months later they moved to Cairo, Egypt, guided by her grandfather's job as an aviation engineer.

Her grandparents permanently returned to Belgrade in 1997, while she and her mother settled in the United States, first in Atlanta, where they joined extended family, and later in Palo Alto, California, where her mother was remarried to a Serbian Orthodox man.

Obreht's grandfather died in 2006, and on his deathbed asked her to write under his surname, Obreht. She later decided to change her last name legally as well. After graduating from the University of Southern California, Obreht received a MFA in fiction from the creative writing program at Cornell University in 2009. She currently lives in Ithaca, New York.

Obreht's work has appeared in The New Yorker, Zoetrope: All-Story, Harpers, The New York Times and The Guardian, and in story anthologies.

Among many influences, Obreht has mentioned in press interviews the Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez, the Yugoslav Nobel Prize winner Ivo Andrić, Raymond Chandler, Ernest Hemingway, Isak Dinesen, Russian writer Mikhail Bulgakov, and the children's writer Roald Dahl.

In October 2011, Obreht was a special guest at a charity lunch organized by Lifeline Humanitarian Organization in New York under the patronage of Her Royal Highness Princess Katherine Karađorđević, to aid orphaned children in Serbia. Obreht participated by auctioning off a private lecture by her at a book club.

The Tiger's Wife

The Tiger's Wife was published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson in 2010. It is a novel set in an unnamed Balkan country, in the present and half a century ago, and features a young doctor's relationship with her grandfather and the stories he tells her. These concern a "deathless man" who meets him several times in different places and never grows old, and a deaf-mute girl from his childhood village who befriends a tiger that escaped from a zoo. It was largely written while she was at Cornell, and excerpted in The New Yorker in June 2009. Asked to summarize it by a university journalist, Obreht replied, "It's a family saga that takes place in a fictionalized province of the Balkans. It's about a female narrator and her relationship to her grandfather, who's a doctor. It's a saga about doctors and their relationships to death throughout all these wars in the Balkans."

The Tiger's Wife won the British Orange Prize for Fiction in 2011 (for 2010 publications). Obreht was the youngest winner of the annual prize (established 1996), which recognizes "excellence, originality and accessibility in women's writing from throughout the world". Late in 2011 she was a finalist for that year's U.S. National Book Award for Fiction.

Novels

Short Stories

Nonfiction & Essays